


Fantastic Beasts and How to Win Their Hearts: A Retelling of Beauty and the Beast

by starfishstar, stereolightning (phalaenopsis)



Series: Collaborative Tales [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AU, M/M, fairytale AU, fairytale reimagining through a harry potter lens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-11
Updated: 2015-10-17
Packaged: 2018-04-25 22:08:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 19,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4978381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starfishstar/pseuds/starfishstar, https://archiveofourown.org/users/phalaenopsis/pseuds/stereolightning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A man with nowhere else to turn agrees to live forever in a remote mansion that exists in perpetual autumn, his host a reclusive character known only as the Beast. By turns attentive and taciturn, the monstrous lord of the house keeps his dark secrets close to his chest, yet both host and guest find themselves increasingly captivated by one another. But how can a Beast give his heart while he remains a prisoner of his own curse?</p><p>A fusion of Harry Potter with Beauty and the Beast, told in seven chapters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For the inspiration that gave rise to this story, we would like to thank penknife, for both the delightful Remus/Sirius gothic romance "[The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time](http://archiveofourown.org/works/14599)” and the equally delightful “[author’s commentary](http://penknife.insanejournal.com/135808.html)” on that story. In the commentary, there’s a spot where penknife notes how Remus falls in love with Sirius’ home library in the story, and how it has shades of “Beauty and the Beast,” casting Remus as Beauty. …starfishstar mentioned this idea to stereolightning (filed under “AUs we will probably never write, but isn’t this idea cool, and also which of them would you make Beauty and which the Beast??”); stereolightning said, Yeah, you should write it! starfishstar said, Why don’t _we_ write it? …And half a year of co-writing later, here it is.
> 
> We would also like to thank [huldrejenta](http://archiveofourown.org/users/huldrejenta/pseuds/huldrejenta) for beta-reading! Your comments were exactly the push we needed to smooth out the last rough edges of this and get to a place that feels complete. Thank you!
> 
> Story is completely written, and will post a chapter a day.

The storm took Remus by surprise.  
  
It announced itself with rushing dark clouds and a ghostly howl. A heavy grey light strangled the memory of spring buds that had only just begun to open. The squirrels and badgers and other small creatures of the forest hid in their nests and burrows.  
  
Remus shivered and pulled his threadbare cloak more tightly around his shoulders. With no home of his own, he was forced to seek out whatever secluded places he could find to transform at the full moon, away from human habitation and away from the danger of inadvertently hurting someone. This month, he’d travelled deep into the woods and spent a painful but otherwise uneventful night alone among trees whose tentative green buds offered first signs of spring.  
  
Now, the full moon was two days gone, a late winter squall was blowing in, and Remus was still too weak to Apparate. His teeth chattered harder by the minute. Snow was sifting through the branches, flecking his much-patched black travelling cloak with white. His feet ached and his weary bones heralded a night of biting cold. He would freeze to death if he didn’t find shelter.  
  
The wind, gusting now, tore Remus’ scarf from his throat and it whipped away on the gale, a red blur. Without it, the cold wind forced itself under the collar of Remus’ cloak. He struggled on, his exhausted mind increasingly fixated on searching for the scarf, concerned not only for the loss of its life-giving warmth, but because it was one of the few possessions he had inherited from his parents, who were now long dead. Perhaps it was a first sign of hypothermia, Remus thought dazedly, but the loss of that one small, sentimental article occupied his thoughts more than the snow falling ever more thickly around him.  
  
The world was monochrome now: slate sky, ink-dark trees, white snow. A blur of red flickered ahead—was that his scarf, caught on a branch? Remus forced himself onwards.  
  
No, it wasn’t the scarf. It was a small tree with red leaves, a vivid hue that surely spoke of magic. Did wizards live nearby?  
  
As Remus approached, he felt the cold lessen. He saw another tree beyond this one, golden as an apple, and another aflame with orange. He kept walking, bemused and exhausted, until at last he came upon a walled garden, rich with autumn leaves. Hesitant, unwilling to trespass but with nowhere else to go, Remus stepped through a wide gate that stood halfway open in the wall.  
  
He stopped and gazed around, amazed. The ivy to either side of him was a brighter shade of red than the brick it clung to. A cluster of apple trees stood in the centre of the enormous garden, their boughs thick with glossy fruit in shades of pale green and blushing rose. Rare magical plants, as well as ordinary plants but ones that did not normally grow in Britain, were laid out in what must once have been tidy geometric patterns, but now had become overgrown and wild.  
  
The garden abutted a grand but crumbling house in an eighteenth century style, with two tall storeys indicated by rows of windows, and a pitched roof. There were signs of habitation—a black Velocette motorbike, parked in the drive; a bird feeder hanging from a tree with fresh seed in it. A pair of blue tufted jobberknolls pecked at the spread.  
  
Remus’ scarf was caught like a kite in one of the apple trees. Relieved, he went and plucked it from the branch, and replaced it around his neck.  
  
He knew he should leave, quickly, and look for an inn or even an abandoned barn or shed, somewhere where he could be certain his presence wouldn’t bother anyone. But he was also well and truly lost, and didn’t know how long it would take to find another place where he could take shelter. Stay, or go?  
  
Over the garden wall, beyond the red and golden and flame-coloured trees, the blizzard raged on, a fugue of grey.  
  
Remus considered camping out in the garden, but he was sure someone lived in the house, and he had had more than enough experiences of waking up to an angry and unwilling host. Best to make his presence known.  
  
So, mustering his strength, he approached the door of the house. He knocked, and the door swung open.  
  
No one was there.  
  
But he heard footsteps.  
  
“Hello?” Remus called. His voice echoed hollowly in the large entrance hall, and he looked up to see a high, coffered ceiling that soared away above his head, ornamented with plasterwork rosettes and frescoes of angels. This was a grand house indeed.  
  
No one answered, but Remus thought he caught the sound of muffled footsteps receding further into the house, down the long hallway that stretched before him. Cautiously, Remus followed the sound.  
  
At the end of the hall, a pair of high, wooden doors swung inwards, and Remus’ breath caught in his throat as he found himself gazing upon a grand banquet hall. A long, ornately carved wooden table, seemingly hewn from a single, massive tree trunk, stretched the length of the high-ceilinged hall, which was lit by the gentle, dancing flames of wall sconces. A merry fire crackled in a wide fireplace at the far end of the hall, and the long table was laid with a feast such as Remus had never seen before. Half a dozen steaming tureens of soup, two roast chickens smothered in herbs, platters of sprouts and carrots and potatoes, a shoulder of pork cooked with apples. Remus was suddenly and forcefully reminded that he had not eaten in two long days of trudging through the winter woods, and his stomach growled painfully.  
  
“Hello?” he called again, rubbing his hands together to warm them. “Is there someone home?” The sight of the feast before him was making his mouth water, but he wasn’t going to avail himself of someone else’s meal with no invitation.  
  
No one answered. No one came.  
  
Tentatively, Remus advanced into the room, towards the warm fire at its far end, trying to ignore the delicacies arrayed on the table as he passed. He would not eat his unseen host’s food, but he could at least warm himself by the fire until the lord or lady of the house deigned to appear. He sank gratefully into a feather-soft armchair and stretched his aching feet towards the fire.  
  
An hour passed. Remus’ stomach rumbled ceaselessly and he was growing light-headed with hunger. No one had come, though Remus called out questioningly again and again. Finally, hating himself for the poverty and desperation that led him to abandon the good manners his parents had instilled in him, Remus rose, gripping the back of the armchair for support.  
  
He would eat just a little, enough to save himself from starvation, no more.  
  
Remus seated himself gingerly at the foot of the table, casting one last despairing look around, hoping his host might have arrived at last, unseen. But no one was there.  
  
“I apologise for my incivility,” he called out. “And I thank you for this meal, whoever you are.”  
  
No answer came. Remus sighed, and served himself small portions only: a bit of bread, a ladleful of fragrant stew, a small plate of vegetables. He poured himself a cup of cold, clear water from a jug that clearly had been subjected to an expertly cast cooling charm, for beads of condensation still sweated down its sides.  
  
Remus ate quietly, chewing methodically, finishing everything on his plate. Then he rose. Wandering unasked through someone else’s home was unforgivably rude, but the alternative was stumbling back out into the storm where he would surely die of cold before the night was through. And if he ventured further into the house, perhaps he would find some sign of his host.  
  
Aware that this was flimsy logic but in possession of nothing better, Remus traversed the room again, leaving the way he had come. Again, the double doors to the hallway opened without the slightest touch. And again, no one was there.  
  
From the main hall further hallways branched left and right. Remus went left, and at the end of this corridor found a wide, sweeping spiral stair. He climbed it and when he reached the top, another door to the right side of a wide landing swung open as if it had been waiting for him to arrive. Unable to resist his curiosity, Remus leaned his head just a little way inside, and found a cosy bedroom, the bed neatly made, one corner of its thick quilt turned down invitingly. A tall candle burned on a little table beside the bed, freshly lit, not even a drop of wax yet pooled at its base. A powerful wave of tiredness overtook Remus then, and he was unable to force back a yawn so wide it left his jaw aching in its wake.  
  
_Perhaps I can lie down just for a few minutes,_ he thought. _Surely my host won’t mind, not when I’ve already eaten the food as well._  
  
Stumbling, his weary fingers barely managing to tug off his snow-sodden boots, Remus half-fell into the soft expanse of the bed, still insistently reminding himself, _Just for a few minutes…_  
  
He slept.

  
#

  
Honey-coloured light streamed in through an uncovered window. Outside, the leaves were still red and gold, but beyond them, past the garden, snow continued to fall.  
  
Remus had never seen weather magic on this scale before, and would not have believed it possible. He wondered what manner of witch or wizard lived here and had made it so.  
  
With curiosity spurring him forwards, he washed and dressed and set off in search of his host or hostess, with an eye to inquiring further about the weather magic, and expressing his thanks for the night’s hospitality.  
  
He met a boggart in the next room he entered, rattling inside a grandfather clock. Down a corridor, he saw a pixie out of the corner of his eye, a flash of malevolent blue. But a lone pixie or boggart was not so terribly worrisome.  
  
The house was old, certainly, but reasonably well cared for. The gilded ornaments on the walls were still bright, and the great Turkish carpets, though they showed signs of wear, weren’t threadbare. The place was full of grand and whimsical features. Inside one salon, a massive candle chandelier hung from the ceiling like a sun in a filigreed sky.  
  
But it was the library that captured Remus’ attention. The large room was stacked floor to ceiling, fourteen feet high, with books, and floating planks of mahogany provided access to the upper shelves. The books on the north wall had been arranged so that the colours of their spines, seen from far away, resembled a map of the world.  
  
A curtain fluttered.  
  
“Hello?” Remus called.  
  
No answer.  
  
Remus approached the row of tall windows. Dust motes drifted in the morning sun.  
  
“Are you the master of this place?” he asked.  
  
But no one was there.  
  
A desk near the window was stacked with pale brown books. The embossed letters flashed in the light— _The Enchanter’s Encyclopædia of Esoterica_ , _Time and Again: Advanced Temporal Magicks_ , _Beasts and Beings of the Ottoman Empire_.  
  
Remus had been educated at home, and afterwards had travelled, scraping together a living as a tutor and sometimes a day labourer, and he had visited many of the world’s great libraries. He knew the wizards’ entrance into the Bodleian, the secret library in the catacombs under Paris, the magical underbelly of the Staats-Bibliotheek der Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek. He had seen grander collections than this, but never before a private collection so large and diverse. He was tempted more now by the books than by the feast last night. He could devour them all.  
  
Could. But mustn’t.  
  
Footsteps sounded in the marble hall. There must be someone there, perhaps someone adept at concealment charms.  
  
“Hello?” Remus called again, moving towards the arched doorway that opened onto the hall. “Are you the mistress of this place?”  
  
The tread was heavy; perhaps not a woman’s.  
  
“Please,” Remus said. “I want to thank my host. You’ve saved me from freezing in the woods last night. I might have died, but for you. Allow me to thank you.”  
  
From somewhere beyond the doorway a voice, hoarse as if unused to speech, replied, “No thanks are required.”  
  
“I insist,” Remus said, taking another step forwards, “on thanking you in person. I wish to see my host.”  
  
“Halt there! I do not wish to be seen.” Though rough, the voice enunciated well. Surely this was a person of letters.  
  
Remus paused just inside the door. “Please,” he said. “I couldn’t leave without thanking you in person. Not in good conscience.”  
  
“Were I to show myself to you, you could not leave at all. Go.”  
  
Remus stood, irresolute, wanting to continue forwards but telling himself not to disobey his host’s wishes.  
  
“None who see me may leave, and I would not trap you here. Go, and keep your liberty.”  
  
“Do you mean to say that, if you allowed me to thank you personally, I could never leave?”  
  
“Yes,” the voice growled, sounding annoyed at Remus’ obtuseness. “This place is under a curse, in case you’d failed to notice. I can’t leave the grounds, and I have reason to believe the same will happen to anyone who sets eyes on me. You would be welcome in the house as long as you like, but there is too much danger that you will accidentally see me if you stay. So for the love of Merlin, _go_.”  
  
_For the love of Merlin_ , he’d said—definitely a wizard, then. And yet, from the sound of it this man had not cast the weather magic on the place himself. Remus was intrigued. And then, too, there was the voice of his mother in his ear, whispering that no son of hers would enjoy a host’s food and hospitality and then walk out the door without a backwards glance.  
  
“ _Go_ ,” the voice beyond the door growled again, and Remus shivered at the vehemence in the tone. “Have you got no sense of self-preservation? Leave me, while you still can.” A different note had slipped into the gruff tone, and Remus knew that sound, knew it intimately, for it was—  
  
Loneliness.  
  
Remus moved closer without a conscious thought.  
  
“Stop!” the voice cried, anguished.  
  
In one mad, condensed moment, Remus’s mind reviewed the course of his life up to this point. Itinerant, poor, hungry, lonely, living desperately hand to mouth, from month to month. He had nearly died in the woods last night, and that hadn’t been his first close call. His life would be a short one, if he continued on as he had done so far.  
  
If he stayed here, he would be a prisoner. A warm, well-fed and comfortable prisoner, yes, with this glorious library at his fingertips every day, never having to worry about the source of his next meal or how to keep the chilblains from his toes, but a captive nonetheless.  
  
And yet, wasn’t he a captive already, shackled to the disease that kept him in perpetual poverty and fear? There were worse prisons than one built of books and crackling fires and the company of a fellow sufferer in loneliness.  
  
“I accept the terms,” Remus said. “Now please let me see you and thank you.” If he stayed, he would have to find somewhere here where he could transform at the full moon without endangering his host, that was his only concern. But there was time enough before the next full moon to learn his way around the walled-in grounds and find a place where he could slip safely away.  
  
“You’re a fool to choose this!” his unseen host snapped.  
  
“But it’s my choice to make!” Remus snapped right back, sudden anger spiking in his chest. This man didn’t know him, didn’t know his life. If Remus chose captivity over death, that was his own business. “My name is Remus Lupin, and I agree never to leave this place. Now, please, let me thank you for your kind hospitality. What’s your name?”  
  
A silhouette appeared in the entranceway, taller than Remus had been expecting. Then Remus’ host stepped into the light.  
  
Stooping, round-shouldered, the form that emerged was covered in matted black fur. He stood seven feet tall, upright on legs that bent the wrong way, like a lion’s hind legs. His teeth stuck out of his lower jaw at an odd angle, and his ears were so large they folded, like those of a dog. His eyes were a pale, lunar grey, and disarmingly human, fringed with the dense black lashes of a cow. On first glance, he looked terrifying and fierce. His posture, though—Remus recognised it instantly as the posture of someone who believed himself beyond the compassion of normal mortals, an emotion that was the twin of his own, and he was not afraid.  
  
The Beast drew himself up to his full height. In a smaller house, his ears would have touched the ceiling. “You may call me Beast, for that is what I am.”


	2. Chapter 2

The Beast was unused to having guests, for obvious reasons. He’d had friends once, even a best friend, but that was long ago.  
   
He did not understand this man who stood before him now. Brownish hair, average height and an average build, aside from at the moment looking rather on the undernourished side of slim. Nothing remarkable about him, and yet he stood looking at the Beast in all his monstrosity without flinching.  
   
“Thank you, Beast, for your hospitality,” the man said gravely. “Far too many in this world are casually cruel to those they do not understand, and I appreciate your kindness more than you can know.”  
   
The Beast shook his great head in confusion. _Kind_ was not a word often applied to him, even if there had been anyone around to call him anything at all. “You’re welcome,” he said. These were words he had not uttered in many years. “Please make yourself at home. If you are to be my guest here, I want you to be comfortable. I can’t offer much in the way of entertainments, but I can at least offer you food and a roof and a bed.”  
   
The man smiled as if at a private joke. “I don’t believe I need to fear I’ll grow bored here. Er, have you _seen_ your own library?”  
   
Unused to human conversation after so long living apart, the Beast cocked his head, unsure if this was sarcasm or not. The silence stretched between them, increasingly awkward the longer he couldn’t think what to reply.  
   
“But in any case,” the man—Remus—said at last, to fill the silence. “If I’m to be your guest here and avail myself of your hospitality, I don’t wish to sit idle. I would like to make myself useful around the house, if I can. I—er—I don’t wish to imply any negligence on your part, but I did notice a boggart in a grandfather clock, and it looks as though you might have a bit of a pixie infestation. Perhaps I could take care of them for you, as a small token in exchange for your hospitality?”  
   
The Beast blinked, and then was distracted by his blinking. Even after all these years, the sight of his own long, dark and unquestionably inhuman eyelashes still caught him by surprise. “You needn’t to do that,” he said gruffly.  
   
“But I would like to,” Remus replied. “It would be my pleasure to be of some use. My father was an expert on magical creatures, and I learned a great deal from him. Would you allow me to help you in that way?”  
   
“Yes,” the Beast said, his answer startled out of him before he’d had a chance to think about it.  
   
Remus smiled then, and the Beast wondered that he’d first thought the man plain.  
   
   
#  
   
   
The day passed as if in a strange dream. There was a man in the house, a fully human man. The Beast, shy of being seen and all too conscious of his grotesque form, hung back out of sight, but watched from discreet shadows as this curious man got to know his home.  
   
He observed Remus’ delight over the rare tomes in the library, which the Beast himself rarely touched, and he noted the quiet competence with which Remus tackled the rogue boggart in the grandfather clock—an ancient timepiece which had, indeed, once belonged to the Beast’s own grandfather.  
   
He watched Remus exploring the house’s extensive gardens, saw how Remus smiled to himself at the sight of two golden snidgets play-fighting on the lawn, saw how he trailed a hand thoughtfully along the branch of an apple tree laden with fruit. The Beast wondered what the man thought of his strange, enchanted home out of time. And he wondered how long it would be before his guest realised what a grave mistake he had made in agreeing to stay.  
   
The man was clearly clever, with a searching mind. Perhaps he would discover a loophole for himself and find a way to leave, despite the curse that trapped the Beast himself here. Surely that was the most likely turn of events, and the Beast would be left alone once again. He tried to harden his heart now, against that future inevitability.  
   
That evening, the Beast instructed the house-elves to again lay a feast for his guest. At first he hadn’t wanted to keep the house-elves—what did a solitary Beast need with servants?—but he had inherited them with the house, and the elves had grown distraught at the mere mention of any possible leaving. Now, for the first time, he was glad of them, because his guest looked like a man who could stand to be fed by a small army of overzealous, underemployed elves.  
   
The Beast watched Remus tread quietly over the threshold into the banquet hall, watched him look around curiously. But this time, Remus didn’t take a place at the table.  
   
“Beast?” he called. “Master of the house, are you there?”  
   
The Beast said nothing.  
   
“Beast, I wish you would join me. I’d rather not dine alone.”  
   
The Beast said nothing. Poor company that he was, surely eating alone would be preferable.  
   
Remus sighed, and ran one hand along the edge of the heavily laden table. “Beast,” he said more softly. “I know I won’t be bored here in this house, but I _will_ be lonely, if I’m never to have your company. Will you dine with me?”  
   
There was a long silence. The Beast, surprised, observed the man and saw that he really meant it. Hesitantly, he pushed aside the tapestry behind which he stood, and stepped into the room.  
   
Remus looked up, and a quirk of a smile played around his lips, at the sight of his host emerging from behind a wall hanging.  
   
“Yes,” the Beast said, his tongue still feeling heavy and hard to manipulate after so long in disuse. “I will dine with you. Please take a seat.”  
   
They sat opposite each other at the foot of the long table. The Beast gestured for a house-elf, who scurried in and poured Remus a glass of wine. Then the Beast and the man lifted their knives and forks and ate in awkward silence.  
   
“Would you tell me a story?” Remus asked at length, as the Beast grew increasingly and uncomfortably aware of all the odd noises his house made when there was someone there to hear them.  
   
“I don’t know any stories,” the Beast said. “It’s a long time since I read any sort of make-believe.”  
   
“Tell me something true, then,” Remus suggested. “Tell me something real that has happened to you.”  
   
The Beast set his wine on the table. It was a sweetish red with notes of persimmon and coriander. When he had been happy enough to enjoy wine properly, he had been too foolish to pay attention to its subtleties. Now the pleasure it gave him felt like a backhanded compliment.  
   
There was only one story the Beast remembered any more. The light amusements, the festive anecdotes, they had left him long ago, and his only remaining story was a painful one to tell. “During the war—” he began, then stopped again. He couldn’t find the words; his past was not something he had any experience in telling. He had lived alone since those cataclysmic events that had changed everything. He looked helplessly across the table at his guest, unable to answer even this simple request.  
   
“It was a terrible time,” Remus said softly. “I took the coward’s way out; I was abroad for nearly all of it. I was...approached, by acquaintances who had allied themselves with Voldemort. They were rather forceful in their insistence that I join them. But my parents were dead and there was no one they could hurt but me, so I left for Algiers, then kept wandering eastwards. I could have done more, should have done more, if I had known whom to contact. I was young and afraid and alone.”  
   
“You were schooled at home,” the Beast said, glad to be back on firmer footing.  
   
“Is it so obvious?”  
   
“We would have met, at school.”  
   
“At Hogwarts, you mean.”  
   
The Beast nodded, and bent his heavy head to stare unseeingly at the plate before him. His Hogwarts schooling seemed so long ago now, those golden days of youth that, in retrospect, he had never really deserved.  
   
Remus, meanwhile, picked at the dregs of his stew. He ate modestly, no matter what the house-elves put before him. And something about his quietly amiable presence invited confidences. Remus had asked for his story; the Beast resolved to try.  
   
“I was at Hogwarts,” the Beast said, his voice sounding rough to his own ears. “I was there when the war began. My friends and I thought our brains and our daring were just what the resistance needed.” He laughed hollowly and added, though Remus hadn’t asked. “Yes, I once had friends.”  
   
He met Remus’ eyes, and saw the question there.  
   
“They’re dead now.” The Beast’s fork clanged against his plate.  
   
“I’m so sorry.”  
   
The Beast stared into the blood-dark stain of wine in his glass. “You wouldn’t pity me if you knew all. How I betrayed them without meaning to betray them. How I failed to protect them and in the process earned myself this curse—” He stopped short. He’d shared too much.  
   
The Beast made the mistake of meeting Remus’ eyes, which were wide with sympathy, his fork forgotten halfway from his plate to his lips.  
   
“Don’t pity me,” the Beast growled. “This outward form is no less than I deserve. I am a beast in form, because I am monstrous inside.”  
   
“Surely—” Remus began, one hand reaching out towards the Beast’s hairy arm.  
   
The Beast flinched away and shoved his chair back. He stalked from the table and exited the banquet hall without a backwards glance. Growling, he retreated with heavy footsteps to a shadowed room on the upper floor, a room plagued with doxies and horklumps, and paced there, back and forth along the lengths of a battered Turkish kilim.  
   
Along the room’s wall, behind sheer emerald curtains, ran a long line of family portraits, who stared and sneered at the Beast as he paced past. There was the cruel aunt who had revelled in twisting children’s ears. There was his mother, her expression permanently fixed in a scornful twist, though the rest of her portrait moved. There was his brother, pale and darkly intense. And, like nearly all the Beast’s family and acquaintances, dead.  
   
And there, at the end of the wall, was a portrait of the Beast himself as a young man, haughty, pale and angular. Human. He’d had all the beauty and joy one man could want, and he had failed to treasure it.  
   
The Beast trod the carpet, back and forth, long into the night. His sharp ears detected Remus’ retreat from the dining room, his paging through books in the library, also late into the night. The Beast could hear, too, the house-elves’ industrious chatter, and the shrill, argumentative voices of the pixies scrabbling along the wainscoting behind the drapery. Something was scrabbling in the Beast’s heart, too, a drowning rat, an ancient fear.  
   
The broken body of his dearest friend. The lifeless eyes of his friend’s wife. The terrified scream of their orphaned child.  
   
“I am a monster,” the Beast whispered to the portrait of his younger self.  
   
His own teenaged, unblemished face stared back at him. The portrait yawned, carelessly bored and insensible of what lay ahead.  
   
The Beast crossed the hall and plucked up the magic mirror that he kept in a dark corner of his bedroom. There was nothing to be seen in it at the moment, only darkness, and the sounds of snoring. The boy was safe, at least. And he knew he had only to call if he were not.  
   
Nonetheless, the Beast couldn’t cease his restless pacing, his wild thoughts. He walked and walked, and didn’t go to bed until dawn.


	3. Chapter 3

The Beast did not appear again for several days, but Remus sensed his presence sometimes, in a deepening of the shadows in an unlit room, or a padded footfall at the end of a corridor.   
  
Remus took breakfast alone, and went outside and stood in a patch of scarlet poppies in the back garden. Snidgets and jobberknolls flitted between the branches of a flame-leafed tree. Remus sprinkled crumbs of his scone for them onto the cobblestones. They pecked at his offering, and he smiled.   
  
“Are you captives, too?” he asked.   
  
They didn’t answer. The jobberknolls, as ever, were completely silent, except for the soft sounds of their feet as they hopped on the cold cobblestones, and the beating of their wings to keep their small, plump bodies warm.   
  
Remus wondered again that the leaves were still red, and hadn’t fallen. It was nearing the first of April. The trees should be budding and green now. There should be white apple blossoms, not full red fruits.   
  
He wondered whether he had wandered into another world, a storybook world, where the seasons were different and time passed differently. He’d read stories of people spirited away to fairy countries, who thought they were gone for a night or a year but were in truth gone for centuries, and returned to their homes one day to find that everyone they had ever known was dead.   
  
But on the off chance he had wandered into another world, he needed to know when moonset and moonrise were here—that was of utmost importance. He couldn’t assume they were the same. He circled the house several times, and finally spotted the moon, a plump, pale hemisphere in the wash of blue sky behind the trees, low in the western sky. Setting, waning gibbous. The same phase as the moon should by now have reached in the outside world, given the number of days that had elapsed since the last full moon Remus had lived through.   
  
Hm, perhaps not spirited away into a fairy world, then. Regardless, he must find a place where he could transform without endangering his host. He still had three weeks until the next full moon, but this was not a matter on which Remus could afford to sit idle.   
  
All that day, Remus stayed outside in the mild autumnal weather, exploring the gardens, watching the shadows shrink and grow long again. He didn’t find anywhere yet that he was certain would be secure enough to hold a full-grown werewolf, but at least he became acquainted with the grounds, with each potting shed, each bench, each stone in the path.   
  
As dusk fell, Remus’ ramblings brought him again to a potting shed around the side of the main house, where he found a dark figure bent over the Velocette. The man—mechanic?—had opened up the bike and was tinkering with the mechanical insides, alternating between wand and torque wrench. It was hard to see in the purple dregs of daylight, but it seemed to Remus that the man’s hair was long, matted, to his elbows, but his hands were finely shaped, and pale, and clever. Was this another willing captive of the Beast? How had Remus not met him before?   
  
The mechanic looked up.   
  
Then the light changed, and the illusion—or misapprehension, or fantasy—melted, and Remus saw that this was no strange dark man, but the Beast, with his black fur and his dog-like ears. There had been a moment when Remus could have sworn it was a man who stood there, absorbed in the complex inner workings of the motorbike. But now he saw that of course it was hairy paws, not human hands, that deftly wielded the mechanic’s tools.   
  
“Found me, have you,” the Beast said, without inflection.   
  
“I wasn’t looking for you,” Remus said. “But it’s good to see you.”   
  
The Beast stifled a sound, something like a choke mixed with a laugh. “Really?”   
  
Remus frowned. “Yes. I do more than read, you know. I like your company, at dinner.”   
  
The Beast grunted, and returned to repairing the engine.   
  
Remus glanced up again; the waxing moon shone more brightly now that the rest of the sky had faded around it. He surveyed the potting shed in front of him and decided he doubted it could contain him at the full moon; its locks were old, and their charms nearly worn off. A full-grown werewolf could easily break them clean off the doors.   
  
The stars came out, and the planets, Mars brightest of all.   
  
“Shall we go in for supper?” Remus asked.   
  
The Beast made a noncommittal noise.   
  
“Or we could stay out here all night, grunting at each other,” Remus said. “But I’m not a mountain troll, and neither are you. I should know; I’m pretty sure I once shared a train compartment with one.”   
  
The Beast let out a snort of surprised laughter, and Remus smiled, pleased to have amused him. His host was so often brooding and in dark spirits, but there was something delightful about his expressions of good cheer when they occasionally broke through the gruff demeanour.     
  
They repaired to the dining room together, their conversation less stilted this time.   
  
“I saw you in the garden today,” the Beast said, his muzzle bent low over a wide bowl of fragrant soup.   
  
“Yes,” Remus said, not sure what the Beast was asking.   
  
“Do you like it?”    
  
“Do I like what, the garden? Of course! The grounds here are stunning, as I’m sure you well know.”    
  
How he wanted to ask about the strange unchanging season of the place, the autumnal cast to all the plants when it ought to be spring. But the Beast seemed open and good-humoured tonight, hard though it was to read expressions on his non-human face, and Remus hated to break that spell.     
  
“And I saw you, working on your bike,” he said instead. “You seem very fond of that old motorbike.”   
  
The Beast looked up, clearly affronted—funny how that expression was unmistakeable, even on his unusual features. “‘That old motorbike,’ I’ll have you know, is a classic! When I first bought it…” He waved his spoon, decorum forgotten, and launched into an impassioned narration of the life of the Velocette, every detail and every repair he had carried out over the years. Remus smiled quietly to himself, pleased to see his host enjoying himself.    
  
All too soon, their meal was finished and the carafe of wine empty. Sopping up the last of his soup with a bit of bread, the Beast smiled sheepishly, clearly aware he had been dominating the conversation. “When were you in a train compartment with a mountain troll, then?” he asked.   
  
“Train from Padua to Budapest. You get all sorts,” Remus replied. “I went to write an article on the lidérc. They’re a sort of magical Hungarian chicken. Fascinating things.”   
  
“What do they do?”   
  
“They’re good at finding gold. A bit like nifflers. But they do have an unfortunate habit of sitting on people, and they’re incredibly heavy for their size. And they’ll drink blood, if they’re not properly trained from the time they’re hatched.”   
  
The Beast chuckled. “Speaking of nifflers, there was one time I—” He broke off, pain flashing across his face. “Never mind,” he said gruffly. “Just a school memory, nothing of note.”   
  
Before Remus could ask more, a house elf appeared, bearing a tray of desserts and a bottle of port. This had never happened before. But then, he and the Beast had never lingered at the table for so long. There was treacle tart, and various cakes, and a raspberry trifle smothered in whipped cream that was threatening to overspill its bowl.   
  
The elf disappeared with a bow.    
  
Remus gazed at the opulent tray of desserts. “This looks wonderful,” he admitted. “I don’t know when I last had treacle tart. I loved it as a kid. What about you, was treacle tart a favourite of yours?” He glanced up, meaning to continue on to ask if the Beast would have the tart or a cake or the trifle, but the look on the Beast’s face stopped him.   
  
“Yes,” the Beast said, staring fixedly at the desserts on the tray. “It was a favourite of—my best friend… He always...” He trailed off again.   
  
“It sounds like he was a wonderful friend,” Remus said softly, treading carefully here, for the Beast’s memories were clearly painful. “You must miss him.”   
  
“Every day,” the Beast growled. “Both of them.”   
  
“Do you want...does it help to talk about it, at all? Would you like to tell me about them?”   
  
“I—no,” the Beast said. “I’d better—” He rose abruptly, the legs of his chair scraping against the stone floor of the banquet hall, his dessert fork rattling against his still unused dessert plate. “Good night, Remus. Sleep well.”   
  
He stalked from the hall, footsteps heavy against the flagstones, and disappeared into the recesses of the house. In the silence that followed, Remus stared at his empty wineglass and at the gorgeous desserts in front of him that he now had no interest in sampling, and wondered where he’d gone wrong.    
  
He’d trod too close to things that were painful and personal, that much was clear. Remus knew himself to be a competent observer of human nature—he’d had to become one, since his survival among witches and wizards hostile to his kind so often depended on it—and he didn’t think he was mistaken in thinking the Beast enjoyed his company. They got on well, the rare times when they managed to occupy the same physical space within this massive house for any length of time. And Remus enjoyed the Beast’s company, despite his gruffness.    
  
He only wished his host wouldn’t flee whenever the conversation showed the least sign of growing personal, wished he weren’t so loathe to show any tender part of himself. The Beast seemed unwilling to allow himself the human emotions he surely still had.   
  
Remus wished he could show his host that the two of them were far more alike than he might realise—both less than human, both with good reason for their feelings of unworthiness. But Remus knew himself to be a coward. Even here, in this remote place beyond the usual bounds of human society, he feared the Beast’s reaction if he learned he was harbouring a werewolf under his roof.    
  
Repairing to his room for lack of any other occupation that evening, Remus nonetheless tossed and turned, unable to sleep for many hours. When he did finally sink into the oblivion of sleep, he dreamt a strange dream.   
  
A handsome young man with dark hair and flashing eyes approached him from out of the heart of a strange, grey mist. In the first moment, Remus thought it was the Beast, though that made no sense—this was a human man, without the Beast’s stooping shoulders and oversized, monstrous head.   
  
“Don’t think that you know me,” the man said, his voice strange and familiar at once. “Don’t think you can guess at the man I am, the man I once was.”    
  
The grey mist swirled around him, playing tricks on Remus’ dreaming eyes. One moment the man was there, another he disappeared into fog.    
  
“Twelve years,” the man went on. “Twelve years I’ve lived imprisoned in this curse, forever caught in the moment of my greatest regret. Hidden away from the world in this old house, because I should not be inflicted on the world.”   
  
Remus shook his head, confused. Surely this graceful, handsome man had no reason to hide.   
  
“The curse is my fault,” the man said, his voice heavy with sorrow. “I pursued the one who took everything from me, but in our confrontation, he denied me the satisfaction of destroying him. He cursed me, then turned his hand and killed himself. The curse can never be lifted, because the one who cast it is dead.”   
  
Such pain constricted the man’s voice that Remus felt the strangest desire to reach out and hold him, stranger though he was.    
  
“ _Don’t_ ,” the man said, raising his hands in warning. “You must not approach me. I am cursed forever.”   
  
“But—” Remus began. He reached out a hand, but the mists swirled, and the man disappeared into that formless mass of grey.   
  
The mist swirled and parted several times, revealing a series of surreal images. A cottage with its roof caving in. Rose petals falling like snow from the sky above. Then, a man with his back turned, wearing a curious suit of thorns, dust, and smoke. He turned—it was the same handsome young man, and he began to shed his strange suit. His body was pale as marble, but fine and healthy.   
  
Remus awoke, parched and sweating, filled with a profound yet abstract desire. It took a long time for sleep to find him again.


	4. Chapter 4

The day began, as it always did, with birdsong and soft pink-gold light, and the Beast greeted it by pulling the curtains shut. Always this temperate weather, always the vivid leaves, and a particular quality to the air—a cold, dry hollowness that made voices carry over long distances. Always the apples blushing on their branches, and the sense that the earth had begun to die, to divest herself of leaves and greenness and fruits, shedding all bounty as she walked on towards a naked winter.   
  
The Beast lived in eternal autumn, though the world continued through ordinary seasons outside the grounds of his inherited estate. Autumn, though lovely to look at, was for the Beast a season of piercing regret. The red leaves were reminders of the blood he had spilled; the gold ones, reminders of the golden wandlight that had twined around the face and torso of the Secret Keeper, on the night the wretch had bound up that precious secret inside himself. Twelve years had passed, and still the Beast was ill with horror when he remembered that night. He should have known. He should have known.   
  
And then, on the heels of the unthinkable loss of the two people he loved most, came the curse, flung at him in his failed attempt to take down the traitor who had betrayed them all, and he was made in the space of an instant as monstrous without as he knew himself to be within. He’d fled in despair to this old house, left to him by an uncle, though the younger, human version of the Beast had never had any wish to live in it.    
  
When he’d woken that terrible first morning he was still a Beast, and he found he was no longer able to step further than the garden wall. And he’d grieved, and raged, and howled at the square patch of walled-in sky above the garden, and all the while the grounds of his prison had stayed autumn, and stayed autumn, forever the season of his greatest regret.   
  
The Beast buried himself under his pillows, shutting out the light. He longed for the smell of spring, for summer butterflies, even for winter nights—but he knew he did not deserve them.   
  
He fell into a dream. He was in the house’s rose garden at twilight and there were hundreds of varieties in bloom, yellow, pink, even a perfect black that grew only in wizards’ gardens. These were roses that had not grown here in reality in twelve long years, but in the dream their perfume was heady and strong. The greenhouse, its glass walls rendered opaque by an accumulation of dirt over the years, was visible at the end of the garden, its door ajar.   
  
And Remus was there, amidst the roses. He wore a strange fur cape, too hot for this summery night. His pupils were huge, but otherwise he looked like himself. Remus was a weather-beaten sort of handsome—or, no, not handsome, not in the classical sense, with that slightly over-long nose, thin mouth, strong forehead, and those curiously perfect ears and generous eyebrows. He would not have been a pretty child, but age or heartache had lent him gravitas, and he carried himself well.   
  
“Promise me you won’t follow me in there,” Remus said, his hand waving in the direction of the greenhouse behind him.   
  
The dream-Beast didn’t answer, didn’t know how to respond.   
  
“Promise me,” Remus said, more urgently. “Never go in there.”   
  
“What’s inside?” the Beast asked, at last.   
  
Remus gave a little wince that became a distant smile. He took the Beast’s hand—and it was a human hand, not a paw, at the end of the Beast’s arm. The Beast was not surprised by this; it was a dream, and everything within it seemed somehow unremarkable.   
  
Remus shook his head. The moon behind him picked out the silver at his temples. His grey hairs were slightly curlier than their brown neighbours. He pulled away, but the Beast held onto Remus’ hand.   
  
Remus shook his head again. “Don’t follow me.”    
  
And he kissed the Beast’s knuckles, then walked away, receding through the roses into the far distance of the garden.   
  
“No,” the Beast called. “Wait.”   
  
Remus didn’t look back.   
  
“Wait!” the Beast repeated.   
  
The roses fell, all at once, from their bushes and vines, splattering petals onto the path.   
  
_ It’s me, _ the Beast thought. _It’s my curse. It’s followed me here._   
  
And the voice of the traitor rang across the wilting garden from somewhere beyond his sight.   
  
“An Invisibility Cloak!” cried the small, shrill voice. “How remarkable.”   
  
The Beast struggled. He had to go after Remus—and yet, now the traitor was here too, in the garden, he had to find the traitor and punish him for what he’d done, but even as the Beast tried to run, something formless and heavy enveloped him, holding him back, pinning him to the ground. He thrashed against it.   
  
“Your father’s cloak? How marvellous!” The traitor’s voice, Peter’s voice, was emerging not from the dream but from the Beast’s room itself, from the corner where his half of the set of two-way mirrors stood atop a chest of drawers, protected in the shadows.   
  
The Beast flung off the heavy blanket that had tangled itself around his legs, shoved away the remnants of the dream, and raced across the room on his huge, padded paws to seize the mirror.   
  
It showed nothing but darkness—his godson must be carrying its twin inside a pocket of his robes. The Beast’s chest constricted with gratitude to Harry, carrying the mirror as the Beast had asked him to do, even though the boy didn’t understand why his godfather was so concerned with his safety.   
  
He had sent the mirror as a gift when the boy started at Hogwarts. Harry didn’t know the Beast’s true name, nor his beastly form, for he was careful always to speak to Harry from the concealing shadows of his dim bedchamber. Harry knew him only as his faraway, reclusive godfather, living somewhere abroad and quite unfortunately unable to visit.   
  
Voices were indeed coming from the mirror, but that wasn’t Peter’s voice. The Beast breathed in relief, trying to quell the panicked thumping in his chest. It was the voice of a girl, not a grown man, and a voice the Beast recognised at that: Harry’s friend Hermione, the one with a mane of bushy brown hair. He’d caught occasional glimpses of her when Harry set the mirror nearby during study sessions or games of Exploding Snap with his friends in the Gryffindor common room. Precious glimpses of Harry at Hogwarts, safe.   
  
And of course it hadn’t been Peter’s voice in the mirror, that was impossible. Peter was long dead. It was only the dream that had confused him.    
  
“Master,” said a high, small voice, and the Beast jumped.   
  
But it was only a house-elf, bringing strong tea. Perhaps that shrill voice had confused the Beast into thinking he’d heard something that couldn’t possibly be. The Beast set the mirror back down in its shadowy corner.   
  
He took the tea in his clumsy paw and downed it in one, then set the cup back on its saucer with unnecessary force. The elf had brought wedges of lemon, too, on a little blue plate, and the Beast bit into one, craving sharpness after hours of blurry fantasies. It burst between his teeth.   
  
A second house-elf opened the curtains, and the same clear autumn light as always filtered through the tall windowpanes.   
  
  
#   
  
  
The real Remus was in the library, poring over three books at once and scribbling notes on a scrap of parchment.   
  
“What are you always reading in here, anyway?” the Beast asked.   
  
Remus looked up. He seemed not to have known the Beast was there, but he wasn’t startled. A gentle smile warmed his features, and something inside the Beast’s chest swooped.   
  
“Books,” he said. “Simply—books.”    
  
The Beast glanced down at the books on the desk in front of Remus; one was a treatise on rare plants, rendered in archaic, tiny print; another was a hefty history of magical Britain from the 13th to 18th centuries, at least 400 pages at a conservative estimate. The third was some sort of pamphlet about wizarding law. All of them the last things the Beast himself was likely ever to pluck off the shelves for a bit of light reading.   
  
“Try to imagine,” Remus said, still smiling, “that you have lived for years on little more than crusts of bread, and you suddenly find yourself guest at a feast fit for kings—that’s what this library is to me.”    
  
The Beast furrowed his brow in consternation. He understood the analogy, of course, but it pained him to realise he could not viscerally imagine what Remus felt, because he had not experienced hunger—of either sort, of the body or of the intellect—as Remus clearly had done. For all his other trials and tragedies, the Beast had never lacked for money, or for the things that money could buy. “I—” he began, then stopped, unsure how to express himself. He had had so little opportunity, all these years, to talk to anyone but the house-elves, and he could feel how sorely he had fallen out of practice.   
  
Remus marked his spot in one of the books with a finger, and turned his full attention to the Beast, upper body swivelling in his chair to face him more fully. He said, “Or—imagine that you have lived for years denied the company of like-minded others, bereft of good conversation, of laughter, of any sense of camaraderie with any being outside yourself. And then imagine—finding that again.” His eyes caught the Beast’s, and held.   
  
“I—” the Beast said again, and again was at a loss for words. He reached out and traced the edge of one of the books, just to have something to do with his monstrous body other than be the subject of Remus’ gaze. “Yes,” he finally managed. “Yes, I have experienced that.”   
  
Briefly but vividly, he recalled the sensations of his dream, Remus’ lips brushing his knuckles. No—the real Remus would never do such a thing. Not to a Beast.    
  
Remus’ hand shifted, across the page and to the edge of the book, where the Beast’s massive paw rested. Little finger brushed littlest claw, and the Beast felt all the air sucked out of his chest, his eyes involuntarily fluttering shut for the space of a heartbeat. For that single heartbeat’s length, his mind allowed him the bliss of returning to his dream.   
  
Then his eyes snapped open, and he saw Remus’ pale, strong hand, resting on the old book beside his own grotesque paw. The Beast snatched the offending limb away, mortified at his own ugliness.   
  
He threw himself into motion, pacing away across the room, trying to disguise his discomfort. “How do you plan to spend this day?” he asked, brusque.   
  
There was a confused pause from Remus at the desk, then he said carefully, “I thought I might explore outside a little more. Are there—other outbuildings I might not have seen yet?”   
  
The Beast remembered the greenhouse of his dream, the greenhouse where Remus had kept some secret. “Why?”   
  
“I—no reason. Curiosity.”   
  
“You’ve seen all the buildings here. There’s nothing else.”   
  
“And...outside the grounds? Are there towns or any other buildings near?”   
  
“You wish to leave.” The Beast had reached the far end of the library; full of restless energy, he had no choice but to turn and pace back towards Remus.   
  
“No! No, I know I can’t leave. I don’t mind. But if I ever needed to go just slightly beyond the grounds, for a short time, do you think it might be possible…?”   
  
Would it be? It had never been possible for the Beast, but perhaps the bounds of the curse might prove laxer for his guest. Remus, clever Remus, would find a way to leave him. Having him here, his conversation and warmth and wit, had been a dream too good to be true.   
  
“Come with me.”   
  
Remus’ voice spoke very close to the Beast’s ear. The Beast hadn’t even seen him get up from his chair. But he had done, silent as a cat. He was standing so near.   
  
“Where to?” the Beast asked, his voice gruff. “The whimsical world of wizarding law?” He gestured one hand at the pamphlet Remus held, and Remus snorted.    
  
“No. Outside. Just—the grounds.”    
  
“You want a tour?” the Beast asked doubtfully.   
  
Remus’ eyes danced. “If you’d be so kind.” He was still standing very close. “A house like this, I’d imagine, has many secrets. I’ve seen parts of the grounds, but I’m sure I haven’t seen it all.”   
  
The Beast nodded. That was true enough. And he needed to move, because standing so close to Remus in the quiet of the library was throwing him into a turmoil. It had been so long since anyone had looked at him like Remus did, and surely Remus’ look didn’t mean what he wished he could hope it might mean.   
  
Men and women both had looked at the Beast like that, in the long-ago days before he was a Beast. They had gazed at him with fascination, admiration, and the Beast had laughed and claimed the joy of their company for himself whenever he liked. But that had been when he was a beautiful youth. Beautiful and shallow, unaware of what he had. No one would look that way at a Beast.    
  
“We can go out this way,” he hurried to say, crossing to the nearest bookshelf, fleeing from Remus’ disconcerting gaze. He tapped the red leather volume about dragons in just the right place, inside the swoop of the “g”, and the entire shelf retracted into the wall, spun, and revealed a spiral staircase.   
  
“There’s a secret passage?” Remus asked, sounding amused.   
  
“Of course there is,” the Beast said. “It’s a house, isn’t it?”   
  
Remus smiled. “You seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that all houses have secret stairs hidden in the walls.”   
  
“Don’t they?”   
  
“No.” Remus shook his head. “This is how you get around without being seen, isn’t it?”   
  
The Beast shrugged. He hadn’t shrugged in years. “I know a few muffling and concealment charms, too.”   
  
He led Remus through the passage, which opened onto what had once been the rose garden, and which was now home to two fairy rings and a family of rabbits. The Beast pointed out objects of interest, when he thought of them, but mostly Remus did the talking. Remus asked a lot of questions—how far was the nearest village (twenty miles), how many house-elves lived in the house (four, one of them quite elderly), were there other secret passages leading out (yes). He wanted to find a way out of the cursed grounds; his line of questioning left no doubt. And yet, the Beast could not begrudge him the answers to his questions, even if each one might bring him a step closer to leaving forever. He would enjoy Remus’ company as long as he had it, and try not to mind too much how soon it would surely end.   
  
“What about that?” Remus asked, pointing to a brass statue, mottled with verdigris, of a very young, very shirtless Merlin conferring with an owl. “Does that have a secret passage under it or something?”   
  
“Him?” the Beast said. “No.”   
  
Remus considered the statue. “Muggles have a similar one, of Perseus, holding the head of Medusa. Same pose, almost exactly.”   
  
The Beast watched Remus’ eyes travel up the dark metal body, over the well-defined muscles of its neck and torso and legs.   
  
“We could draw a map,” Remus said. “Of this estate. A magical map.”   
  
“Why?”   
  
“So we could see people’s comings and goings. Have you ever used a map like that? You can charm a parchment to show people as well as places. Anyway, magicartology is a fascinating hobby. And you have at least ten books about it.”   
  
“No one comes near here, except those who are lost. Besides, I can hear for miles, with these ears. I can hear the dormice in the fields over there.”   
  
The Beast stopped himself. He never discussed his monstrous form, or its peculiar quirks, with anybody. But Remus did not look alarmed, or ashamed. He was gazing at the Beast with a warm, almost sage expression.   
  
“What else can you hear?” Remus asked.   
  
The Beast considered this a moment, then closed his eyes and listened—really listened, to the diffuse music of the world. He heard the family of rabbits hopping through dry leaves; the tinny, hollow plinking of a broken charm somewhere in the vicinity of the motorbike; two house-elves polishing glass and silver. The thudding of a human heart.   
  
The heartbeat quickened.   
  
The Beast opened his eyes. For one hopeful fraction of a second, he imagined he would see Remus still looking at him, with warmth and understanding, and maybe even something more.    
  
But Remus was looking at the gap in the garden wall, out at the world, where spring was emerging, in a thousand shades of green.


	5. Chapter 5

  
Over the next few days, Remus worked on the map. What had started as a whim, something diverting to draw the Beast out of his frequent bouts of melancholy, expanded into a project that engrossed them both, keeping them together in close proximity in the library.    
  
Remus was glad to see his kind but moody host enjoying a task for once. And he couldn’t help but think that it wouldn’t hurt, either, to have such a map for his own reference. If they could complete the charms that caused the map to reveal the movements of individuals by the full moon, Remus might be able to keep it close by that night, to be sure there was no one around before he transformed.   
  
The Beast had a quick mind, Remus found, and an inventive eye for magical detail. And when they sat together, bent over the big desk in the library, his host forgot to be so very reticent.   
  
Remus began sketching a rough floor plan of the house on a large sheet of parchment, but the Beast leaned over his shoulder and offered so many suggestions that Remus finally handed the parchment up to him with a laugh. “You do it,” he said. “You’re the one who knows the layout of the house, anyway.”   
  
The Beast seemed embarrassed, at first, to be seen clutching the quill in his massive paw, but when Remus made no comment, he gradually relaxed into the task. He drew with surprising steadiness, sketching smooth arcs and straight lines without the aid of tools. One afternoon, Remus left to check if the actual dimensions of the house’s kitchens matched the way he’d drawn them on the map, and came back to find the Beast sprawled in a large leather chair, writing intently with a parrot feather quill, oblivious to all else.   
  
Remus stopped in the doorway and watched him. There was something about his posture that was almost regal. A careless prince.   
  
He wondered what sort of man the Beast had been, in his former life—a selfless warrior, a rakish gentleman playing at resistance, a loyal friend who lacked self-control? How did someone brave enough to fight Voldemort and his Death Eaters end up hidden away in a crumbling old mansion in the woods?   
  
He wondered, too, at the fondness that warmed his chest, when he watched this man—this Beast—intent at his work. Remus knew better than to allow himself to fall for anyone. Even for a man who was himself also a sort of monster. In certain moments, Remus allowed himself to believe he’d found a rare connection here, someone who liked him for himself and wouldn’t be scared away by the inevitable revelation of his own monstrous form. Someone who—   
  
No. As a werewolf, he posed danger. Did he pose a danger even to a beast who had once been a man? He wasn’t sure, but he wouldn’t take the risk of finding out. For that matter, was he a danger to house-elves? It wasn’t a question Remus had encountered before, not having spent his time among those wealthy enough to keep servants. He must keep his distance, for everyone’s sake.   
  
Remus cleared his throat as he stepped into the room, and the Beast looked up, startled.   
  
“The kitchen dimensions are right,” Remus said, his voice coming out as a bit of a croak. “No need to change anything.”   
  
The Beast kept looking at him, curious, and Remus wished he could ask what he saw. He didn’t dare. He’d already been too forward, too often, more than he should have allowed himself to be. Remus experienced a pang of wistfulness for the itinerant life he’d led before arriving here. It was an absurd thing to think, given how often he’d been half starving, unable to find or keep enough work even to keep himself fed, but he’d grown accustomed to being able to slip away whenever anyone looked at him too closely.    
  
It was a failing of his, Remus knew, wanting to be liked but not quite seen.   
  
He saw his host watching him closely, those next days. It was growing critical for Remus to find a place where he could transform at the full moon, but with the Beast’s attention on him it was hard to slip away to explore. Time and again, he found himself seeking out the gaze of those deep grey eyes, then reminding himself yet again that now was not a time to be seeking connection; now was the time to figure out how he could disappear when necessary. The deep, warm happiness he felt in the core of his being whenever he caught that grey-eyed gaze was surely irrelevant.   
  
Finally, only a day and a half before the full moon, Remus found what he needed: a small cellar that was reached by descending a flight of narrow stone stairs hidden behind a small door at the far end of the kitchens. The door was sturdy wood and it bolted from the inside. Remus would cast every protective charm he knew, making the cellar Imperturbable and soundproof. He would have to make some excuse that evening, tell his host he was feeling unwell and wished to retire to bed early, and then somehow slip downstairs without any of the house-elves seeing him, but he would manage. He hoped to Merlin he would manage.   
  
Over the next few hours, the moon pulled at him, a monstrous tide rising in his blood. The world became fevered, urgent, and small. His hands shook and didn’t stop. He could no longer write nor draw with any steadiness. But he didn’t have to; the physical work of creating the map was done, and all that remained were the spells to animate it. Alone for a moment in the library, Remus bent over the map and whispered a series of incantations— _animato, veracia, revelia sempre_ —and the map became alive with moving dots.   
  
The house-elves—who according to the little letters under their dots were called Blinken, Finchlet, Tothby, and Mag—were all in the kitchen, perhaps peeling potatoes at a table, from the way they were positioned. There was Remus’ own dot, in the library. And there, coming down the hall, was an unexpected name, the name of a nearby star. But—that must be the Beast’s true name, then, because there was no dot anywhere marked “Beast.” Remus, already growing foggy, felt an odd pang of sentiment at the sight of the unusual name. Strange to think someone with such a lovely, lyrical name would cast it off in favour of “Beast.”   
  
The moon was coming. He felt it tug at his muscles, ligaments, fasciae. He felt it in the swollen flesh around his teeth and in the aching marrow of his lower vertebrae, the premonition of fangs and tail. He wanted to drink something hot and fragrant and transporting, tea or coffee, but knew that it would only make him more keenly alert, when what he needed most urgently was keep the wolf subdued tonight, keep him quiet, keep him from being found.   
  
The Beast once known as Sirius Black appeared, stooping to fit through the doorway. The familiar sight of him filled Remus with a vague but unmistakable gladness. He could feel already how the moon was dulling his human faculties, tugging them away, and his stomach felt as though it were filled with sharp, heavy stones. But he still knew instantly that this was a person it pleased him to see. His mouth lifted in a smile.   
  
“Hello,” Remus said weakly, then cleared his throat. He must not give any sign that the moon was affecting him.   
  
“S’it finished then?” the Beast said.    
  
“Hmm?”   
  
“The map.”   
  
“Oh.” Remus took a deep breath and smoothed out the parchment. “Yes. Come and see.”   
  
Sirius crossed to the desk. Was it Remus’ imagination, or did his fur look a little glossier, a little less unkempt than it had done before? Or perhaps it was something animal in Remus himself, recognising something animal in the Beast, something no true human being would discern.   
  
“It shows names,” the Beast said.   
  
“Yes,” Remus agreed.   
  
“You never said it would do that.”   
  
Remus tried to remember—was that true? He shook his head. “Is there a problem?”   
  
The Beast’s expression was hard to read. He was staring at the parchment.   
  
“Have I upset you?” Remus asked.   
  
The Beast grunted. “I wondered whether it would show non-human creatures. Now I see it does.”   
  
Remus’ heart jumped. Did the Beast know what Remus was? Or was he referring to himself?   
  
“Sirius,” Remus said.   
  
The Beast’s huge grey eyes flashed.   
  
“Or, or, Beast,” Remus said. The moon had hold of him; his head was hot and muzzy. He glanced out the window; evening was fast approaching. “Only, I don’t feel so well today. I think I might—might take a walk through the garden and then retire early. I don’t think I’ll dine with you tonight.”   
  
The Beast dropped the map onto the table. “You do want to leave. Don’t you.” It wasn’t a question.   
  
“I don’t intend to leave, no,” Remus said.    
  
The Beast had turned those large grey eyes on Remus again, and they were full of some great feeling Remus still could not read. Then the huge black ears twitched, and turned as if to hear something in another room, the way a cat’s might do.   
  
The Beast quit the room all at once and disappeared into the hall, padding away on his huge feet. Remus traced his dot on the map as it travelled all the way to the upper floor of the east wing, to a room Remus knew to be the Beast’s private bedchamber. There the Beast stopped. Remus heard a distant murmur, a conversation too far away to hear. Who was the Beast conversing with? Surely not the house-elves. Their dots on the map were all in the kitchen.   
  
Then, a long and quite human howl. An anguished, horrified howl.   
  
Remus bolted from his chair, map in hand, and followed the path to the Beast’s dot.   
  
“What’s wrong?” he called, then stopped short as he crossed the threshold of the Beast’s own chamber and took in the sight.   
  
A mirror stood propped on a dresser, and three people—three young teenagers—looked out of it. A freckly, redheaded boy; a girl with bushy hair and slightly oversized teeth; and a small, pale boy with bright green eyes, lopsided glasses, and a scar on his forehead shaped like lightning. Remus recognized that last face, of course—what wizard wouldn’t? But why was his host talking to Harry Potter?   
  
“You’re sure?” the Beast was demanding of the children in the mirror. The room was so deeply cast in shadow that the image in the mirror was by far the brightest thing in it. “He calls himself ‘Professor Wormtail’ and he’s missing a finger on his right hand?”   
  
“Yes, but why—” the boy with the lightning scar began.   
  
“No time,” the Beast interjected. “Meet me outside Honeydukes at nightfall, Harry. Not you two. You lot stay in the castle.”   
  
“No way,” protested the redheaded boy.   
  
“Too dangerous,” the Beast said. “Nightfall. Honeydukes. Bring the Cloak, Harry, that will keep you safe. Your friends need to stay in the castle. I’ll explain everything to you then, but you have to be sure to get out without anyone seeing you!”   
  
And with that, the Beast charged away, towards the secret stair behind the tapestry of the fainting hippogriff.   
  
Remus blinked in confusion at the children in the mirror. They didn’t seem to be able to see him in the darkness of the Beast’s room, and they were already turning away from the mirror, conferring amongst themselves. Remus gave the mirror a last, baffled look, then hurried after Sirius, down the secret staircase.   
  
He could hear the Beast darting from one room to another with surprising speed, and he caught snatches of manic sentences. “At Hogwarts. He’s at Hogwarts!” And then, oddly, something that sounded very much like “his finger!”   
  
“Who?” Remus called to the Beast’s huge, dark back, as he finally caught up to him in the garden, where the Beast was charging towards the far gate. “Who’s at Hogwarts?”    
  
The shadows of the trees were long—when had they got so long? Night and moonrise were at Remus’ heels. And ahead of him, the Beast didn’t slow in his frantic dash for the garden gate.   
  
“You’re—leaving?” Remus called. It was growing harder to find words for things—Remus reached for them, but they weren’t complying with his wish to use them, to fit his lips around them. He was quite sure the Beast had said from the start that the curse kept him from going beyond the grounds of the house, but perhaps Remus had misunderstood? Everything was so blurry now, colour leeching out of the world around him as the moon rose inexorably up towards the lip of the horizon.   
  
One hand on the gate, the Beast spun around, an inscrutable but passionate expression pulling at his strange features.    
  
“I’m sorry,” the Beast said softly, his eyes locked on Remus’. “There’s no time to explain, but I’ve got to try. I’m going to force my way out of here if it kills me. I can’t stand by this time, Remus. He’s at Hogwarts. With Harry.”    
  
With that cryptic explanation, and with anguish vivid in his enormous grey eyes, the Beast raised his wand, said “to Hogwarts” with fierceness such as Remus had never heard, and turned on the spot. He spun much longer than Apparation normally required, twisting faster and faster until he became a dark blur. Through it all, Remus could hear the Beast screaming as though his heart were ripping in two.   
  
And then, with a drawn-out _pop_ , he was gone. No sound now but the early evening peeps of snidgets.   
  
It was late evening. Far too late.   
  
Remus bolted back to the house, ran as quickly as his aching, clumsy body would allow through the kitchens, with no time to explain to the house-elves.   
  
“Alohomora!” he called to the cellar doors, wand aloft. He wrenched them open and charged down the narrow staircase.   
  
The moon was so close now. He could smell the way it changed the world, made everything wilder and nearer and fuller. He smelled meat in the kitchen above, bloody and fresh and marbled with fat. But the wolf didn’t want that kind of meat. Not beef. The wolf wanted—no, no.   
  
Remus slammed the cellar doors behind himself and cast a series of protective charms, his tongue stumbling on the words.   
  
His whole body went rigid. His lungs exploded with pain. Fur forced its way through his skin, covering his arms, face and feet, and he fell forwards onto his hands and knees. Holding onto human thought with all he had, Remus shucked off his robes, tearing them in his haste, and tucked his wand away into one pocket.   
  
His bones reshaped themselves inside him, and his scream of pain became a howl. 


	6. Chapter 6

The Beast landed at the edge of Hogsmeade with a gasp. He’d done it. After years of trying everything he could to escape his opulent captivity, he’d finally managed it—because Harry needed him.   
  
For a heady moment, he lifted his nose and breathed in the scents of spring. Twelve years since he had smelled the scent of blossoming flowers.    
  
But he had more important things to do here than admire the vegetation. In the distance, above the treetops, the Beast could see the spires of Hogwarts, the scene of the happiest years of his life, home to the merry pranksters once known as Sirius, James, Lily...and Peter.   
  
How dare Peter show his face here? How dare he be _alive_? He had cast his curse on Sirius and then he had died. The Beast knew this, had seen it happen with his own eyes. So how was Wormtail alive and at Hogwarts?   
  
Ensuring his hood was drawn down low to hide his monstrous countenance, the Beast hurried through the falling dark until he reached Honeydukes. There, he hid himself in the shadows at the corner of the building and waited for his godson, the boy he hadn’t seen in person in nearly thirteen years. The street was silent. His heart pounded.    
  
Feet sounded against the pavement; the Beast spun towards the noise, his concealing hood clutched tightly around his face. A boy was running towards him with a silvery cloak bundled under his arm, and even in the dusk the Beast would have recognised those flashing green eyes anywhere.   
  
“Harry—!” he cried, stepping forwards.   
  
“Wait—” the boy panted. “I’m sorry—I know you said to come alone, but he saw us sneaking out. But it's okay. He said he won't give us detention.”   
  
The Beast felt his heart dropping, fast. “Who did?”   
  
Harry was still out of breath. “Professor W—”   
  
“Professor Wormtail,” interrupted a high, quavering voice, and Peter Pettigrew precipitated out of the shadowy street, his wand held aloft. Behind him came two more students—Ron the freckly redhead and Hermione with the bushy hair. Harry’s friends.   
  
Peter's voice was just as Sirius remembered. The face was altered—whether by inexpert charmwork or a long-ago curse, it was impossible to say. The nose was shorter, the face oddly stretched, the watery eyes now of unequal size. He might well pass as someone other than himself, if no one who had known him well ever looked too long.   
  
“Your _professor_ ,” Sirius spat, “is a cowardly murderer. He killed your parents, Harry, and he deserves to die.” The Beast reached for his wand, then thrust his arm in Peter’s direction.   
  
Ron gasped. Hermione cried, “No!”   
  
Harry sprang in front of Wormtail, shielding him. “What are you doing?” he cried.   
  
“He’s trying to kill me, is what he’s doing!” Peter shrieked, clutching Harry’s shoulders and ducking so he was more fully protected.   
  
The Beast kept his wand arm extended, unwavering. “His name is Peter Pettigrew, he was a friend of your parents, and he betrayed them to Voldemort.”   
  
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but this is my professor, Benjy Fenwick. He teaches Defence Against the Dark Arts. And he lets us call him Wormtail, Professor Wormtail, that’s his nickname.”   
  
The Beast laughed, the sound painful in his throat. His wand was still pointed at Peter, though he could do nothing now with Harry standing between them. “Benjy Fenwick? That’s a twisted touch. Is that how you’ve hidden all this time? Faking your own death in our duel and living under stolen identities ever since?”   
  
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Peter cried shrilly. “My name _is_ Benjy Fenwick, and I’m a decorated veteran of the war against the Dark Lord!”   
  
“Benjy Fenwick is dead. I was there. I saw him blasted apart in battle—they never recovered his body. _You_ , though. Show me your hand!”   
  
“My hand?” Peter quavered, still cowering behind Harry.   
  
“Your hand! We duelled and I thought you’d died—but all they ever found was your finger. If you are Benjy Fenwick, which you aren’t, your right hand was whole and complete until the day you died. But if you’re Peter Pettigrew, you’re missing the index finger of your right hand. _Show me your hand_.”   
  
Hermione piped up from the side, where her gaze leapt anxiously between the Beast’s outstretched wand and Harry, “It’s true, professor. We’ve all seen that you’re missing a finger.”   
  
“Oh, that!” Peter cried. “I lost a finger in the war, everyone knows that.” Then his uneven, rabbit-like eyes peeped over Harry’s shoulder at the Beast as he asked, “Who are you?”    
  
“He's my godfather,” Harry blurted, at the same instant Sirius said, “None of your concern.”   
  
“Godfather,” Peter repeated, so quietly it was nearly a whisper. Without warning, he darted out from behind Harry and fired a jet of quick blue light at Sirius. Sirius’ hood fell away.   
  
One of the children screamed. The Beast reared back, scrabbled to cover his face, but it was too late.   
  
“What are you!” Harry shouted.   
  
“Harry—”   
  
“No, get away from me!” Harry had leapt back, towards his friends, and was staring with wide eyes.   
  
The Beast raised a placating hand. “Harry, it’s me, Sirius, your godfather. You know me by my voice. I was cursed many years ago to look like this, but it’s me.”   
  
“That’s why you’ve never let me see your face!” Harry shouted, enraged. “You’re a monster! You’ve been deceiving me all these years!”   
  
“A monster,” Peter said, and his voice rose to a shrill, nervous whine, as it always had done when he was improvising an excuse at school. “He was going to try to steal you away, Harry, this ugly, jealous creature. He filled your head with lies. Lured you out of school. It's very good I was here, very good, indeed.” Peter straightened up, patted Harry paternally on the back. “Trust your professor, and come back to school now.”   
  
“You,” the Beast growled. “How dare you. Don’t you dare touch him.”   
  
The Beast lunged, but both Hermione and Ron burst forwards, positioning themselves between Sirius and his quarry. Before the Beast could react, they disarmed both Sirius and Peter with cries of “Expelliarmus!”   
  
Harry sidestepped Peter, and produced his own wand. “One of you is lying,” he said. “Which is it?” He looked to Hermione and Ron, as if they might know.   
  
Sirius wanted to grab Peter and shake him, curse him, wring the life out of him with magic or bare hands, but there were three children in the way, and he first needed Peter to cast the counter-curse, to end Sirius’ days as a Beast. Perhaps then, if the curse were lifted—Sirius was hit with a wave of yearning for it—Harry could come _home_ and live with Sirius, as his godson and heir.   
  
“Not I!” cried Peter. “When have I ever hurt a hair on Harry's head! It's that Beast who’s lying! He’s a foul Dark creature, can’t you see what a monster he is?”   
  
“Because of you!” Sirius yelled. “This monstrous form is your doing! Harry, listen, after he sold your parents to Voldemort, I tracked this worthless rat down, and we duelled, and he cast this curse on me, before turning his wand on himself. For the longest time I thought he had killed himself. There was so much light and smoke and blood. But I see now that the second spell was a feint. He used it to escape. He's been hiding in the shadows ever since, scavenging the lives of fallen friends.”   
  
“Hide in the shadows? Me?” Peter cried, hysterical. “It's him who hides in the shadows, Harry! Sirius Black! Such an unhappy young man, driven to madness long ago, and now he looks as horrible on the outside as he is on the inside. He lied to you. He told you he lived in some far-off country, didn’t he? But he doesn't! He lives in his grand old family house right here in Britain!”   
  
“Yes, that’s true, and it’s the only lie I’ve told in all of this! I didn’t want to scare you, Harry. I didn’t want you to know why I couldn’t let you see me.”   
  
But the damage was done. “You’re the liar,” Harry said, turning his wand on Sirius. “You lied to me. Why should I trust anything you say?”   
  
The Beast felt his whole body freeze, as if ice were encasing his heart and spreading outwards through his lungs. If Harry ran away from him now, without understanding the whole story—if Peter was allowed to stay near Harry, whose parents he had betrayed to Voldemort—No, the Beast _must_ make Harry understand the danger. But he stood frozen, unable to find the words.   
  
“Harry,” said Hermione, her voice scared but strong. “It’s not impossible that both of them are lying. Or, Sirius may have lied about some things, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t telling the truth about this. I mean, it’s silly to think that only one of them is capable of lying, isn’t it?”   
  
“I have to choose who to trust,” Harry said. “Professor Wormtail’s always been decent to us.” He rounded on Sirius. “What were you going to do, with my Invisibility Cloak?”   
  
“Finish the job I started twelve years ago,” the Beast snarled. That, at least, was an easy truth.   
  
“There, you see!” cried Peter. “Completely insane! Utter madness!”   
  
“Harry,” Sirius said, his voice rough. “Hear me out. Let me tell you what I know, and then you can choose who you believe. If you believe I’m lying, I will leave and never bother you again.”   
  
Harry stared at him and Peter in turn. Finally, he nodded. “Yeah, all right.” He folded his arms, the picture of teenage scepticism. Beside him, Ron shifted uneasily. Hermione adjusted her grip on the wand she held, Sirius’ wand. She stood alert but listening.    
  
“Your father was my best friend,” Sirius said. “I would have died for him. I was meant to be your parents’ Secret Keeper, but at the last minute, we switched. To _this_ scum.” He spat the words in Peter’s direction. “It turned out he’d been spying for Voldemort all along. He ran to his master with their location, and Voldemort, he—murdered your parents, Harry. Your dad and your mum. And when I came to the house and found them—” He choked on the words, but forced himself to go on. “When I found them, to my eternal regret, instead of staying and looking after you, I ran after this coward, desperate for revenge. I left you with Hagrid, loaned him my motorbike—”   
  
“Your what?” Harry interrupted, in a very odd tone of voice.   
  
“My flying motorbike, I lent it to Hagrid that night, so he could get you safely to Dumbledore.”   
  
“I remember that,” Harry said, his voice still very strange.   
  
“You can’t possibly!” squeaked Peter, interjecting in the story for the first time. There was fear in his voice.   
  
“I do, though,” Harry said, slowly, staring at the Beast in wonder. “I used to have dreams about a flying motorbike. I thought I’d made that up.”   
  
“It doesn’t mean anything!” Peter squawked. “Or he might be faking it! He—he heard that somewhere, that you remembered flying on a motorbike, he’s just using whatever he can find to trick you—”   
  
“You really were there,” Harry said, staring at Sirius, ignoring Peter completely. “You were there that night. You were a friend of my parents’.”   
  
“Yes.”   
  
“You were my parents’ friend, and so was he, and he was the one who got them killed.”   
  
“Yes,” the Beast growled.   
  
Harry studied his face, his monstrous face, and the Beast forced himself not to wince away from that probing gaze. At length Harry said, “I believe you.”   
  
Hermione gave a little cry and rounded on Wormtail, extending the arm that held Sirius’ confiscated wand.    
  
“Professor Wormtail,” Hermione said, her voice quivering with indignation. “You _lied_ to us!”    
  
Peter blinked his rat-like eyes, panicked and fast.   
  
“Let me at him,” Sirius snarled.   
  
Hermione glanced back at him, worry etched in her face. “What are you going to do to him?”   
  
“Make him release me from this curse.”   
  
Hermione looked at Harry. Harry looked back. Some understanding must have passed between them, because Hermione stepped aside and handed Sirius’ wand back to him.   
  
The Beast advanced, wand raised. Wormtail cowered, and the Beast in all his monstrous height towered over him. “You did this to me. You cast this curse that turned me into an inhuman beast and trapped me in my own home, in eternal autumn. I thought you were dead, and there was no hope of ever reversing it. But now that I know…” He raised his wand higher and bared his teeth. “If you want any hope of surviving this night, _lift the curse_.”   
  
He could live as a man again. He could experience all the seasons again, not only the chill autumn of his loss. As a man, he could offer Harry a home. As a man, perhaps Remus—   
  
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Wormtail snivelled, ducking low to the ground and avoiding the Beast’s eyes. “I can’t undo a curse like that.”   
  
“You’re lying! Lift the curse!” The Beast advanced until he stood over Peter, his wand aimed straight for his throat. Peter, at last, raised his small, terrified eyes to meet the Beast’s terrible gaze.    
  
“I—I can’t—”   
  
“Expelliarmus!” cried a horribly familiar, oily voice from the shadows, and the Beast’s wand flew from his hand.   
  
The Beast spun towards the sound. The owner of the voice, narrow and sallow as ever he had been, stepped into the moonlight. “Out of bed, at this late hour. Potter, Granger, Weasley. Fifty points from Gryffindor. Each.”   
  
Sirius moved to take back his wand, but Snape pointed both the wands he now held in his hand, the motion lazy yet deadly precise, bringing him up short.   
  
“I’m not sure what you think you’re doing in Hogsmeade at this hour, with these students, but I can see that you’ve greatly upset them,” Snape said coolly. “And as I’m sure our professor for Defence Against the Dark Arts must have an excellent reason to be cowering there in the road, you’ll understand if I’m sceptical as to your good intentions. Do stand up, Fenwick.”   
  
“Professor Snape, you didn’t hear,” Hermione began, a little breathless. “He’s not Fenwick, he’s—”   
  
“That’s enough, Granger. You are already facing suspension, if not expulsion, from this school.” Snape’s black eyes flicked back to Sirius, studying him minutely. “Well, well. Can it be? At last I understand why you haven’t been flaunting your patrician features in high society all these years. ‘Living abroad,’ wasn’t that the story you put about?”   
  
“Give me my wand,” the Beast growled. “I don’t know how you recognise me, and frankly I don’t care. The real danger here is _that_ man.”   
  
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Snape breathed. “In fact, I think I had better hold onto this wand for safekeeping.  And truth be told, Sirius Black, I see no difference between the beast you were at school and the beast that stands before me now. ”   
  
Panic was rising in Sirius’ chest. “You don’t understand what you’re doing. I’m not the danger here. I’ve come here to save Harry.”   
  
An oily smirk. “Save him from what? End of term boredom?”   
  
“From that worthless piece of filth!” Sirius cried, pointing at Peter, who still had not risen.   
  
“Enough,” Snape snapped. “I shall escort these children back to school. Slouch back to your self-indulgent exile, if you wish. It’s no concern of mine.”   
  
Rage boiled higher inside Sirius’ chest. “You!” He lunged, but Snape, lighter and quicker than the Beast, only had to step out of the path of his charging feet and fists.   
  
Then Ron shouted a warning, and there were hard, running footsteps as Peter pelted away up the street with his wand clutched again in his small, pale fists. The Beast wheeled around to follow. He was without a wand, but if he could just grab hold of him—   
  
He charged after Peter, he was gaining with every step, he nearly had the man’s collar in his grasp—   
  
There was an ear-shattering _pop_ , and Peter was gone.   
  
Harry ran up to Sirius. “Where is he?”    
  
Sirius shook his head.   
  
“No!” Harry cried. “He can’t just—I mean he can’t just—where did he go?”   
  
“Children, you will return to school!” Snape ordered behind them. The Beast turned to see Ron and Hermione glaring back at Snape, defiant.    
  
Sirius crossed to Snape and took back his wand with a hard, swift jerk. “I’ll have that back. Do you have _any_ idea what you’ve done?”   
  
“Have I not made myself perfectly plain?” Snape drawled to the students, looking past Sirius as though he were not there. “Up to the school. Now.”   
  
“I’ll take them there,” Sirius bellowed.    
  
“And how, pray tell, shall you open the gates to the school, when you are neither teacher nor keeper of keys?” said Snape. Then softer, waspishly, “And how will it be when the whole school sets eyes on you, Black? When they see you for what you always were, the outside matching the inside at last?”   
  
There was a tap at the Beast’s shoulder—Hermione. “It’s all right, Sirius, er, Mr Black,” she said. “We’ll tell Dumbledore everything.”   
  
“Yeah, we will,” Ron said, nodding his agreement.   
  
Sirius glared at Snape. Snape glared back.    
  
“Er—maybe we can just all walk there together?” Hermione suggested.   
  
With a minute, angry jerk of his head, Snape acquiesced, and all five of them started towards the castle in silence.   
  
Sirius let Ron and Hermione fall a few steps ahead, following the hateful black outline that was Snape. The Beast lay a hesitant paw on Harry’s shoulder. Harry, extraordinary Harry, didn’t pull away.   
  
“If you see any sign of him—if he comes back to the castle—” Sirius said. The very thought of it filled him with rage. Peter, at Hogwarts with Harry all this year, and he hadn’t known. Where was that horrid rat now? Running straight back to his old master, no doubt, now that his cover was blown. How long until they began to feel the effects rippling outwards from this night? How much more damage might Peter do, once he was back at Voldemort’s side? How much damage had Sirius done, by letting the rat slip through his grasp?   
  
“I’ll contact you through the mirror,” Harry said. “But he won’t come back, will he? He’s not going to dare to come back, now that you’ve discovered him.”   
  
They had nearly reached the school. Sirius glanced up at its moonlit spires, at the winged boars topping the gates that provided entry to the grounds. He looked down at Harry, who was gazing up at him, wearing an expression Sirius had seen a hundred times on Lily Potter’s face—concern, and something quietly ferocious. How fervently Sirius had hoped to give him a real home, the home Lily and James had intended when they named Sirius as Harry’s godfather. All hope of that was gone now, extinguished as quickly as it had begun.   
  
“If ever you need me,” Sirius said, his voice breaking. Everything he wanted to say to Harry died in his throat. How could he offer a home to his godson, when he was too monstrous to be seen? How could he protect him, when he himself inspired hatred and fear on sight? It destroyed him to hand Harry back into Snape’s care, but he had no choice.   
  
“I’ll call for you,” Harry said. His eyes were wide. “I promise.”   
  
“If you’re quite finished with your tearful goodbyes,” Snape sneered. They had reached the school gates. Snape swirled his wand in the air, the movement unnecessarily showy, and the heavy Hogwarts gates swung open. Snape chivvied the students through and onto the path that led up to the castle, and the gates clanged shut behind them. Harry glanced back, but Snape pushed the boy ahead and swept along after him, his bat-like cape flapping absurdly behind him.    
  
Sirius watched his godson until he was a speck on the grassy moonlit hill. In the distance, the castle doors swung open and golden light spilled onto the lawn. Then the small dots that were Harry and his friends stepped through, the light extinguished, and Harry was gone.   
  
Unable to hold back the breaking of his heart, the Beast threw his head back and howled his grief at the sky. Then he spun on the spot and was gone.   
  
  
#   
  
  
The courtyard of the house was full of the customary scrabblings and scratchings of small creatures when the Beast returned. The air felt warmer than usual, a soft breeze sighing through the trees and lifting dry leaves up from the ground, but all the Beast could feel was the weight of his heart, so heavy he could barely stand.    
  
He had failed. All these years he had suffered his curse in silence, but at least he had had the small comfort of knowing Peter, who had betrayed them, was dead. Now he knew a far more terrible truth—Peter was out there, and free. The curse would never be lifted. And Sirius could never be more than a distant figure in Harry’s life, a shadowy protector in a magic mirror. The eternal autumn that had begun for Sirius on the day of his friends’ deaths would never lift.    
  
Sirius slouched inside the house and through the dining room, where an untouched feast steamed magnificently. He plucked up a leg of something—chicken, maybe, he was too heartbroken to care—and gnawed on it, feeling no pleasure. A bottle of white wine sat in a bucket of ice, and he picked it up, uncorked it with a spell, and drank. The bottle was gone before he had finished slouching through the lower rooms of the house, unsure quite what he was after, but walking, restless, through the familiar faded opulence. He ascended a staircase and entered the library, remembering with a vague pang of delight and responsibility that he still had a houseguest. Perhaps seeing Remus would offer some solace.    
  
Sirius owed him an explanation, too, for his hasty exit. The expression on Remus’ face when Sirius had dashed away… The Beast knew he had been terribly rude to his—guest? Or dare he think of him as a friend?    
  
Remus’ customary tidy piles of books lay on the desk, carefully bookmarked, but no Remus sat beside them. The mahogany planks hovered perfectly still beside the highest shelves—no Remus perched on any of them. Sirius called Remus’ name. No answer.   
  
He searched the rooms of the upper floor. Remus’ bed had not been slept in; the house-elves had turned down a corner in their usual fashion and put a glass of water on the nightstand, but there was no sign of Remus.   
  
He couldn’t be lost in the house? Not after they had made that map.   
  
Perhaps Remus truly had gone—he could be deep into the woods and halfway to the little hamlet twenty miles away by now, or he might have Apparated. Or something might have happened to him, one of the house’s other magical creatures might have bitten or cornered or incapacitated him. The boggart was gone, yes, but an old house like this always attracted magical fauna. But hadn’t Remus proved himself competent at self-defence, when he’d taken on the pixie infestation weeks ago?   
  
Where was he, then? Increasingly worried, increasingly sure that Remus had gone for good, Sirius walked faster. Through the silent banquet hall. Through the kitchen. The locked cellar caught his eye.    
  
He tried the doors—they refused to budge.   
  
“Alohomora!” he cried, but still they didn’t open. Growing more concerned by the moment, the Beast tried more advanced disarming magicks, calling on spells he hadn’t had cause to use in years. He thought he heard something in the cellar now, scrabbling and whining. He worked faster, concentrating fiercely, and finally the doors burst open. Sirius descended into the cellar at a run.   
  
An unfamiliar smell. Musky, animal.   
  
“Lumos,” Sirius cried, and his wand tip lit up.   
  
A huge, grey monster with a werewolf’s unmistakable slit pupils stood at the foot of the stairs, its great, shaggy paws planted in a puddle of Remus’ torn clothes. And Remus was nowhere to be seen.


	7. Chapter 7

At the sight of the Beast, the werewolf lowered itself into a crouch and growled.   
   
The Beast gave a howl of rage of his own. “You foul creature!” he cried. “What have you done to Remus?”  
   
The werewolf lifted its nose and sniffed the air, a look that seemed almost confused crossing its lupine face.  
   
“Did you eat him, you monster? I’ll _kill_ you.” The Beast lunged, but the werewolf was fast. It shot around Sirius’ legs and up the cellar stairs. He heard it crashing through the kitchen, knocking down pots and pans in its frenzied flight. “Come back!” the Beast shouted, and gave chase.  
   
The werewolf darted through the rooms and corridors with surprising ease, as if it knew the layout of the house already, and dashed into the garden. The Beast finally caught up with it by the potting shed where he kept his Velocette.  
   
“You murderer!” he screamed, and threw himself on top of the werewolf, which snarled and thrashed beneath his weight. It opened its jaws, its sharp teeth terrible in the last pale light of the setting moon, preparing to bite—and then it whined in confusion and snapped its jaws closed. Sirius pressed his advantage, trying to get his hands around the creature’s throat. “I—will—kill you,” he grunted. “You killed Remus, I will—”  
   
The wolf whined again, some strangely human emotion in its yellow eyes. Sirius’ fingers finally found purchase around its throat and squeezed. He could feel its pulse thudding wildly. Then the animal began to contort under his hands, its body bucking as if it would burst out of its very skin.  
   
Morning was near. The moon was setting.  
   
The wolf emitted the most piteous sound Sirius had ever heard—a resonant moan, full of fear and pain and shame. The creature’s tail was receding into its lower spine and its legs were growing longer, bending the other way. Its ribcage expanded and changed shape, and on and on it moaned, flecks of blood flying from its mouth. Its claws flattened and widened, becoming fingernails, and its paws became hands, the dewclaws stretching painfully until they became thumbs. Last, and worst of all, the face—the long snout shrank and separated into lips and nose, bending the creature’s moan into a human scream. The teeth retracted as the skull gained mass. The bones of the face settled into an all too familiar countenance, and last, the eyes changed from round and yellow to human, etched round with lines, framed by eyebrows brindled with grey.  
   
Those eyes fixed on Sirius, refusing to let go.  
   
Remus’ body lay at an odd angle, completely unclothed, on the cold stones of the courtyard. He was shaking. He wheezed, trying to speak.  
   
“Don’t,” Sirius whispered, horrified by the harm he had very nearly done. He scrambled off of Remus, terrified now of hurting him, but kept one hand resting gently on Remus’ shoulder, urging him not to move. He used the other to find his wand and Summon a length of fabric, something velvety and ancient from the drawing room. He wrapped Remus in it, then picked him up tenderly like a child. In human form, Remus weighed next to nothing.   
   
“I’m sorry,” Remus croaked, his voice muffled against Sirius’ shoulder.  
   
“You should have said something, before,” Sirius replied, his voice harsher than he meant it to be. “I didn’t know it was you. I nearly killed you.”  
   
“Most people—don’t like—werewolves as houseguests,” Remus wheezed.  
   
“I’m not most people,” Sirius growled, and he carried Remus into the house, calling out as he went for the house-elves to draw a bath.  
   
He deposited Remus in the ornate upstairs bathroom, in the claw-foot tub under the care of the house-elves who surged in around him, chattering and fussing. Then the Beast walked away, back out to the garden where dawn was slowly breaking through the autumn chill.  
   
   
#  
   
   
Remus’ host had left him in the bath and stalked away. His expressions were difficult to read, and Remus wasn’t sure if he was angry. He must be angry. Remus had misrepresented himself, played guest under false pretences, then transformed within the house itself, mistakenly believing he would be a danger to no one if he stayed within the locked cellar.  
   
He should have known better. He was always a danger. Even—perhaps especially—to this kind-hearted Beast.  
   
Groaning with the effort, Remus rose and stepped out of the claw-foot tub. The house-elves, Blinken, Finchlet, Tothby, and Mag, clustered eagerly around him and offered a fresh set of borrowed clothes.  
   
“This is too much,” Remus protested. “I’ve endangered you all. I should leave, not accept clothes from you.”  
   
“Endangered!” Mag exclaimed. “Mr Remus Lupin is not endangering elves, sir! Elves is safe from werewolves, sir.”  
   
“Really?” Remus asked, surprised for a moment out of his self-pity and guilt. “Are you absolutely certain? A werewolf wouldn’t try to attack you?”  
   
“Elves is not _humans_ , sir,” sniffed Finchlet, as if this were very obvious indeed. Which, perhaps, it was.  
   
Tothby had fetched Remus’ wand from the cellar, and presented it now with a flourish.  
   
“You’re too kind to me,” Remus said, surprised and moved.  
   
“Remus Lupin, you is our master’s guest, sir,” said Blinken, with an air of this explaining everything.  
   
After thanking the elves, Remus made his way, slow and creaking, downstairs. His bones still ached, though the warm bath had helped. Sirius was nowhere to be found in the house, so Remus continued out to the garden in search of his host, apologies already crowding at his tongue. The sun was up. Another full moon survived, but at what cost? Had he destroyed the trust of the one man from whom he was coming to feel he might wish it most of all?  
   
He found Sirius by the potting shed where he kept his motorbike. He’d pulled the motorbike out of the shed, but didn’t seem to be working on it. He simply stood, hands resting on its seat and head bowed, as if deep in thought.  
   
“I’m...sorry,” Remus said from behind him.  
   
The Beast turned. “Remus.”  
   
“I lied to you,” Remus said, taking a cautious step closer. “I lied by omission. I should never have spent even a single night beneath your roof without telling you the truth about myself. Instead, I spent a month.”  
   
“Remus,” Sirius said again, and it sounded like a growl. Remus had to work to keep himself from taking a step backwards, so fearsome did Sirius look.   
   
“I’ll go,” Remus said. Surely if the Beast himself had been able to leave the grounds last night, then Remus would be able to do so too. Especially now that he would be unwelcome here. “I only wanted to tell you that I’m sorry. And to thank you—for your hospitality, for everything. You’ve done so much more for me than I ever could have asked for.”  
   
“You’re leaving?” The Beast crossed the space between them in two long strides. “Why?”  
   
“ _Why_? Because I’m a werewolf! Because—because, how could I possibly stay now that you know?”  
   
“What if I don’t care?” Sirius growled.  
   
“How can you not care!” Remus cried. “Don’t you understand? I’ll always be like this, every full moon. You have the hope that your curse may be lifted someday, but I don’t have that chance. Every month for the rest of my life, this is what I will be.”  
   
“And if I still don’t care?” The Beast’s paws had come to rest on Remus’ arms now, sliding slowly up from his elbows towards his shoulders. It was strange how human the Beast’s face appeared sometimes, from certain angles. Or perhaps it was in certain kinds of light, like the rosy dawn that was now washing the garden in warmth. “I thought—I thought you’d left. That was the worst possible thing. Far worse than what I learned when I did find you.”  
   
“But—” Remus protested.  
   
“And my curse won’t ever be broken either,” Sirius said, his voice sliding into a snarl. “Last night, I found the man who cast it, the traitor who did this to me. He refused to break the curse, and now he’s disappeared. That hope is gone.” His hands—no, paws, they were paws, of course, though their touch felt like that of long, elegant fingers—clutched at Remus’ sleeves. “But I deserve it. I am a Beast, I deserve to be a Beast.”   
   
“How can you say that?” Remus demanded. “You are so kind. You care so much. That boy in the mirror was Harry Potter, wasn’t he? And you’ve been looking out for him from afar all this time, even though you couldn’t be there with him. How can you possibly think you’re a monster?”  
   
“I’m a Beast.” Sirius’ low voice quavered, as if it would break with emotion.  
   
“Are you sure?” Remus whispered, gazing into that almost-human face. He wondered to think he’d believed the Beast’s head shaggy and overly large, his ears dog-like. He looked very much like a man.  
   
“I—I don’t know,” Sirius whispered back, his eyes wide and his voice hushed with wonder. “I feel—”  
   
“ _Sirius_ ,” Remus exclaimed, because he was sure of it now. “Look!”  
   
Sirius looked down with wonder at his hands, his human hands, where they held tightly to Remus’ arms. He shook his head from side to side, looking startled at how lightly and easily it moved. “Am I—?”  
   
“You’re a man,” Remus said, awed. “Aren’t you? When I look at you, I see a man.”  
   
“No—it can’t be—”  
   
But even as he said it, Sirius’ body was growing smaller, slimmer, although still quite tall.  
   
“It _can’t_ be,” Sirius repeated. There was no question about it, he looked like a man now, like any other man. “Peter’s the one who cast the curse, he’s the only one who should be able to lift it.”  
   
“Sirius,” Remus said slowly, the thought unfurling in front of him only as he spoke it aloud. “Wasn’t part of the curse not being able to leave the house and grounds?”  
   
“Yes,” Sirius said, looking back at him, baffled. His hands, his lovely, elegant hands, were still wrapped warmly around Remus’ arms.  
   
“But you left the grounds last night.”  
   
“Because I had to. Harry needed me.”  
   
“But could it be…what if you broke the curse yourself? You broke away from here through the force of your caring. What if that caring broke the curse entirely?”  
   
“That’s not possible,” Sirius breathed, his eyes wide and fixed on Remus. Those grey eyes were still the same as the Beast’s had been, but they had resolved into a new face, set like jewels above high cheekbones. “Ancient transformative curses like that, only the one who cast the spell can lift it.”  
   
“Did you actually see him cast the curse?” Remus asked.  
   
“I—no. It was in the middle of a duel with dust flying everywhere, and the air was full of smoke and light. But something happened, right in the moment when Peter died, or when I thought he died. Something changed in me, and as soon as I was able to stop and take stock, I found I was a Beast.”  
   
Remus felt his own eyes growing wide, reflecting back the wonderment etched on Sirius’ beautiful human face.   
   
“Some are cursed by others,” Remus said softly, thinking of his own curse, his illness, inflicted on him when he was such a small child. “But others curse themselves. Sirius, is it possible… When you duelled this friend who had betrayed you, and watched him disappear in front of you before you could take the revenge you sought, at a time when you were full already of grief and guilt and remorse over the friends you’d lost… Sirius, is it possible the curse came from within yourself?”  
   
Sirius stretched, arching his back. He glanced down at his own hands on Remus’ arms, flexing his human fingers and marvelling at the sight. Then he leaned his head back to gaze up the sky and laughed in delight at the sensation. Finally, he lowered his head again and returned his gaze to Remus. “Yes,” he said in a low, awed voice. “Yes, it must be possible. Nothing else makes sense. But then…how did I break the curse? Why now?”  
   
Sirius’ voice was different now, smooth and rich. His hands were warm at Remus’ shoulders, and he was standing so very close. In human form he was tall, dark-haired, a man of aristocratic mien and desperate beauty. His black hair was long, unkempt, and his over-large robes hung on him like rags, but even in his dishevelled state, he was heartbreakingly handsome. A Caravaggio saint reimagined in a Gothic idiom.  
   
This was no Beast, but a Beauty. Remus hesitated, stuttering a step backwards, all too aware of his own shabbiness, his greying temples, his patched robes. What could such a beautiful man want with someone like Remus Lupin, werewolf?  
   
“It seems,” Remus said, his voice catching as he tried to keep hold of his thoughts despite this proximity, Sirius’ body so close to his own, “that you did it with the force of your caring. Your love. For—for Harry. If your curse came out of your grief at having failed those you loved, then your caring for Harry healed it.”  
   
“Not only Harry,” Sirius murmured, his eyes locked on Remus’. His voice had dropped to a sensuous thrum. “Who showed me how to let someone back into my life after all these years? Who made me laugh again?”  
   
Remus stared. Was Sirius saying—did he really mean—?  
   
Remus’ own curse was one that could never be cured. But his loneliness, that was a thing he’d brought upon himself. Perhaps it was also a thing that could end.   
   
Seized by mad impulse, Remus leaned in and kissed Sirius full on the mouth. Where before there had been the fur of a beast, now there was warm skin and rough stubble, the sensation of it against Remus’ cheek both ferocious and tender. Sirius’ hands tightened on his arms, and Remus felt desire sparking through him, burning all the way out to the tips of his fingers. His own hands rose of their own accord and found Sirius’ hair, the warm skin at the back of his neck.  
   
“You fought only in self-defence, you know,” Sirius murmured against Remus’ cheek. “When you were the wolf. You never attacked. I don’t think I counted as human to the wolf, when I—when I was—a Beast. I don’t think you’re any danger to me. If you’re worried about that.”  
   
“You’re a Beast no more, Sirius.” Remus pulled away from him, took a step backwards, afraid to give in to the hope that was beating wildly his heart.  
   
“But I could be again.” Sirius took a half step forwards, closing the gap between them. “If you wanted me to. I could accompany you at full moons. I could change myself back, I’m sure of it.” A jagged, lovely, hopeful, mischievous grin stole across Sirius’ face. He extended one hand in the space between them. It became a paw again, then a hand once more.  
   
Remus stared.  
   
“I would be safe from you, see? Say yes, say you’ll let me transform with you, so you don’t have to be alone.”  
   
“We can try it,” Remus agreed cautiously. “We’ll make a controlled experiment of it at the next full moon, to make certain you’re truly safe from me.”  
   
Sirius rolled his eyes, bright and merry, at Remus’ caution. “Yes, yes, all right, precise and controlled experiments only.” Then his face lit up, as he took in what Remus had said. “Does that mean you’ll stay?”  
   
Remus stared back at him, confused. “What do you mean?”  
   
“You’re no longer bound here by any curse, Remus. You can go whenever you choose. But I wonder if… I was hoping… Will you stay, of your own free will?”   
   
Sirius’ gaze was so desperately hopeful. No one had ever looked at Remus like that. And Remus knew there wasn’t any question. He never wanted to go another day without those eyes meeting his. The very thought—that this was possible, that he could stay and have this joy every day—left him giddy. He caught Sirius’ hand, the one that had been a paw and then a hand again, in his own.  
   
“Yes,” he said. “Sirius, of course, yes.”  
   
This time it was Sirius who surged forwards and caught Remus’ lips. Remus gasped into the kiss, the urgency of Sirius’ mouth on his. His hand reached again for the warmth of the nape of Sirius’ neck. Sirius growled against his lips and pulled him closer.  
   
A patter, then a rumble. Startled, Remus looked away from Sirius and his breathless kiss, and saw that the apples were falling from their boughs, thudding against the ground. The fiery leaves of nearby trees shuddered, then dropped. The garden’s smaller plants drooped and wilted, drying into pale winter husks of themselves. Snow burst from the sky, dusting the garden and the eaves of the house with shimmering white. Remus turned back to Sirius and watched, entranced, as flakes of snow landed on Sirius’ long, dark eyelashes.   
   
Sirius blinked, and laughed in delight. He stuck his tongue out and caught one snowflake perfectly on its tip.  
   
And already the snow, too, was melting. Bright new shoots pushed their way out of the soil, leaves and buds unfurled on each tree and shrub. The grey bushes straightened their stalks and burst out with leaves that stretched towards the sun. In every direction Remus looked, the world was a riot of green in every hue and shade. He glanced at Sirius, who was grinning with wild joy, and when he looked back at the garden, roses of every colour were bursting into bloom—tropical red, velvety orange, even a delicately chartreuse specimen as big as a dinner plate, peeking out from behind Sirius’ knee. The apple trees were a maelstrom of pink and white blossoms.  
   
“It’s wonderful,” Remus breathed. His eyes found Sirius’, their grey now bright with life and fervour.  
   
“It’s _right_ ,” Sirius said. “This is right. Remus, there’s so much to do, I’ve got to undo the damage I did when I let that traitor escape a second time. But I know we can do it. We’re going to start setting things right.” Remus could feel how Sirius trembled in his arms, but his voice was strong. “Let it come. The future. All the things we have to do.” His hand slid down Remus’ arm and found his hand. “And all the things we wish to do, too.”  
   
The grounds now matched the forest beyond, bursting with new life and colour.  
   
Grinning with delight at the sights of it, Sirius said, “I think Harry should live here, if he wants to. In the holidays, whenever he needs somewhere to call home. Would you mind that, if he came here? Having someone else in the house?”  
   
“Sirius, I’m still a werewolf. I would be a danger to him.”  
   
“We’ll work something out. We have the map. We’ll find you somewhere secure—I’ll build a new wing to the house if I have to. And I’ll be here, looking out for you. Harry can come home. _You_ can be home.”  
   
Remus’ heart was in his throat. Was it really possible? Could this—could Sirius—be his home? Almost afraid of the intensity of his happiness, Remus reached for levity. “Oh, I don’t know, don’t you think it might get a bit crowded? I’d hate to have to share the five bathrooms here with someone else.”  
   
Sirius gave a laugh like a bark and clasped Remus more tightly in his arms. Sirius’ eyes were so bright with joy. And Remus found he believed him, beyond any shadow of a doubt. This was safe. This was home.  
   
Remus laughed too, giddy with happiness. “Well,” he said. “I suppose we’ll work something out. Five divided by three is still rather generous, isn’t it?”  
   
“More than I could ever have asked for,” Sirius said solemnly, and then how could Remus do anything else but take that dear face between his hands and kiss it? The garden around them was a flood of green, a dazzling palette of colour. Somewhere high above their heads a songbird chirped, heralding the season.  
   
Spring had come at last.  
   
   
**THE END**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, lovely reader, for following us into this AU/fairytale/fusion imagining of Remus and Sirius as Beauty and the Beast! We had so much fun creating it, and we hope you had fun reading it. 
> 
> If you enjoyed this story, here are others of ours you might enjoy as well:
> 
>  **other co-written stories by stereolightning and starfishstar:**  
>  • [Nymphadora Tonks and the Marauder's Box](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1150918) (Remus/Tonks, and Remus-Sirius-Tonks gen)  
> • [The Pied Piper of Privet Drive, or, How the Dursleys Came to Be Short-Listed for the All-England Best Kept Suburban Lawn Competition](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3073655) (early OotP full-ensemble gen, and pre R/T)
> 
>  **Remus/Sirius fic by stereolightning**  
> [Dog of Darkness, Dog of Light](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2642117) (Remus/Sirius, Marauders friendship, Christmas)
> 
>  **Remus/Sirius fic by starfishstar**  
>  • [On a Windswept Cliff](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2066574/chapters/4492539) (the Remus/Sirius gothic romance AU!)  
> • [A Constellation’s Just a Picture in the Sky](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5268578/chapters/12157184) (a slight-canon-divergence AU of adventure and romance)  
> • [The Fall of the House of Black](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12462843) (another gothic romance, that's also a fusion with Edgar Allan Poe)  
> • [Northern Sky](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12526136)  
> • [Dust and Soot and Silence](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2348966)  
> • [Hangover Cures](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2642246)  
> • [Shipwreck Against Your Eyes](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2642282)  
> • [Never Say Never Never](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2707922)  
> • [Boys in Space](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1736696) (silly little outer space AU)  
> 


End file.
